If you have considered marketing on social media, producing a video might have been one of your first thoughts. And as it turns out, promoting your business with a video on social media is a great idea. Statistics show that videos increase audience engagement – which drives conversion rates (in terms of clicks, likes, and even purchases).
Video now dominates social media, so getting comfortable with the medium will benefit you in the war for attention. Before you start making that “viral” video, however, there are some pitfalls you want to avoid.
It’s not TV
Social media is popular because new information gets uploaded constantly. Coupled with user-friendly navigation and users who seek instant gratification, social media is one of the hardest platforms to acquire and retain attention, since users tend to jump from one thing to the next.
This makes it even more important to properly grab the viewers’ attention with something interesting. Your video also needs to be interesting enough from beginning to end. An eye-catching opening that doesn’t lead to interesting content will lose viewers’ attention as it goes on, and will only generates views (Facebook count views after watching 3 seconds), and not conversions – what you want.
Post less, more often
Long gone are the days where you could spend lots of money on a single spot and re-run it across all platforms. Nowadays, all ads have a popularity scale that quickly diminishes after the initial launch. Sure, you can keep boosting the ad and drive the curve up, but studies show this has a negative effect on conversion rates and public image – don’t be annoying.
The solution is to provide fresh content regularly. Create more videos with less budget. Assuming your content is interesting, this will be a more effective approach.
Caption Your Video
Depending on your platform, most videos on social media are muted until the viewer interacts with the video in some way. This means that captioning plays an important role. By captioning your social media videos, not only do you capture attention more easily, but you also make your content available for hearing impaired users.
If you keep all this in mind while creating your videos, your social media strategy is more likely to succeed. To sum up the perfect video for social media, here are some bullet points you can follow:
- Use humor, drama, visual aesthetics etc. to capture attention.
- Make it short: 30 seconds – 1 minute max.
- Use Music to retain attention.
- Have your video Captioned.
- If you don’t want/don’t have the resources to caption, make your spot graphic extensive.
- Ask yourself: “Would I take the time to watch this?” If not, spice it up!
- Have a concise “call to action”.
